in Pinar del Rio, Cuba
Photo Feature by Fabiana del Valle
HAVANA TIMES – The Hacienda Cortina, now the La Güira National Park, is a paradise in the midst of the humid mountains in Cuba’s westernmost province of Pinar del Rio. Many have written about its exotic beauty, but such a place doesn’t emerge like magic; it has a history that sustains it, people who invested in every stone, and legends that have passed from mouth to mouth.
Jose Luis Valdez, historian from San Diego de los Baños, collects the memory of his town and its people. His contagious passion has led me to write today about this place, where I walked hand in hand with my father, alongside whom I grew up as a powerless observer of its decay, where with canvases and brushes, I breathed art.
José Manuel Cortina, the former owner of the estate, was a cultured man with refined taste, considered one of the most notable orators of the time and who wrote for several magazines. In 1908, he was a representative in the lower house, later becoming a senator. He also served as Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1936-1937 and from 1940-1942. He was president of the committee that created the Cuban Constitution of 1940, and when his lands were confiscated in 1959, he and his family left to exile.
The construction of Hacienda Cortina began in 1906 and lasted until 1920. It was one of the largest in the region, with 11,000 hectares dedicated to the breeding of pigs and cattle, as well as the cultivation of coffee, tobacco, timber and fruit trees.
Jose Luis says that when Jose Manuel Cortina arrived in the area at the beginning of the last century, he was not yet the wealthy man he would later become. The estate was abandoned and unproductive. There were several families living on its land, so he sought their support to begin agricultural and livestock projects that would gradually increase his wealth.
The estate’s entrance is a formidable stone wall that resembles a Mozarabic fortress, with a massive door secured with chains and two large towers or minarets that greet visitors as symbols of balance and universal order. It was completed in 1931, when Cortina was 51 years old, and the celebration was attended by friends and influential people of the time.
For Jose Luis, even the overflowing nature throughout the park has its history, and he has set out to preserve it. Many trees that symbolized the park have disappeared for various reasons. For example, the two royal palms at the back of the entrance. The one on the right wing was knocked down by the hurricanes of 2008, and the other fell in the same way in 2022. With the collaboration of the “Mil Cumbres” Forestry Company, they have set out to replant these palms and other species that once were part of this place.
Once the entrance is passed, a ceiba tree can be seen. Very few people stop to ask whether it is part of the aesthetic and cultural readings of the park or if it grew there spontaneously, as it is generally ignored. However, the deteriorated sculpture of a goddess reclining at its feet tends to catch the attention of some curious visitors.
The Greek goddess reclining on the ceiba was made by the Japanese master Yuso Yokamoto Nakasawa, as were many others to decorate the roundabout of the Club House, now the “Las Ruinas” restaurant. It represented Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture.
Long before the restoration, the sculpture had lost its head, and it was removed from its pedestal and placed under some trees. With the 2014 restoration, new sculptures were made at the Throne of Dionysus: Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus, sculptures created by the San Diego artist Noel Hernandez.
Jose Luis doesn’t know who the pious person was who rescued Demeter from the wilderness, but the truth is that she is there, resting comfortably in the embrace of the mother ceiba tree. She is part of the landscape and the mystique of the place, even though her location was not intentional.
“On the hill where the Chinese Pagoda once stood, now the La Parrillada restaurant, there was a small wooden house with tiles that served as temporary lodging for the estate’s owners. In 1920, it was inhabited by the Japanese Takata Yosida while he built the Japanese collection that today functions as the Asian Museum.
By that year, a tree known as Guaguasí by the Cuban natives was already standing at the back of that house. An old friend, who spent most of his 80 years near the area, told me that the tree was very old, and many people visited it for the medicinal powers of its bark.
After several decades, this old tree still stands, gnarled, twisted, and sometimes battered by gusts and machetes, yet incomprehensibly it has healed from its wounds.
Many of the pieces once housed in the Chinese Pagoda and the Japanese Collection before 1959 are not displayed in the Asian Museum, which was reconstructed in 2014. In the book En Marcha con Fidel: 1959, by Antonio Nuñez Jimenez, in Chapter XXVII, The Face of Latifundism, the author describes them. No one knows which private collection currently holds them,
Jose Luis, our historian, carefully collects the memories of every stone, the breath of each person who was there from the beginning, when a freshly graduated lawyer began to build his dream. Unfortunately, he does not have all the answers.”
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